Today (January 25), Amazon Publishing–which is the trade publishing house, not the self-publishing platform–has announced the creation of a new children’s book imprint: Amazon Crossing Kids.

The new imprint will focus on picture books in translation for children.

Needless to say, Amazon Crossing Kids has the benefit of a powerful and much-appreciated sibling imprint, Amazon Crossing, which today is the world book industry’s largest and most aggressive publisher of literature in translation.

. . . .

Amazon Crossing Kids may be welcomed by the translation community as a new chance to get culturally and thematically diverse content in front of the youngest readers.

In a prepared statement, the publisher of Amazon Publishing, Mikyla Bruder . . ., says that the new development “blends the missions of Amazon Crossing and Two Lions by introducing terrific books from around the globe to readers who are beginning to develop their worldview.

“Whether a title has a universal theme with regionally-influenced artistry or focuses on an aspect of local culture,” Bruder says, “our list will encompass a broad range of perspectives, styles, and characters that celebrate what makes us unique as well as what we have in common.”

. . . .

Led by editorial director Gabriella Page-Fort, Amazon Crossing has broken the translation barrier for many readers by using some of the business’ most skilled and best-known translators and by offering genre literature as well as literary fiction–a way to attract consumers to the work by genre rather than by language or cultural background.

The imprint doesn’t shy from literary fiction, but features historical fiction, romance, mystery, thrillers, and other work that great translation houses in the past tended to eschew. The same understanding of the market can be expected to inform the new Amazon Crossing Kids imprint. Skea will work with Page-Fort and with Two Lions editor Marilyn Brigham. The project is to engage a pool of authors, illustrators, and translators from many parts of the world.

Doing it rather more intelligently than Apple, working from the top down.

For a while, you could hardly find a school (that had computers) which had installed PC compatibles. The theory at Apple was that all of those kids would grow up to use Apples (later Macintosh) for the rest of their lives.

Didn’t work all that well – just about all of them ended up working in real world businesses, for which Apple products never have been practical. (Except for the “creatives,” of course, where Apple does excel so far as I can tell.)

By the time my kids were in high school (last decade), I could find maybe two or three Macintoshes in the entire building; they did have a small selection of digital arts electives.

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